Follow by Email

Monday, 8 August 2016

"What Is Essential Is Invisible To The Eye"

‘The Little Prince’ (Le Petit
Prince), by the
French writer and aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, was published in
1943, a year before the author’s death-he was probably shot down
during a reconnaissance mission for the French Air Force. It’s
a poetic tale, simply
told, in which a pilot stranded in the desert (desert settings are a staple of
the Torah narratives too) meets a young prince who has fallen to Earth from a
tiny asteroid.

The story is
a philosophical allegory about the search for love, for relationships that
matter, for inner peace – and about the complications that arise in all those
human enterprises. One of the key ‘messages’ of the tale is uttered by a fox,
who meets the young prince during his travels on Earth, and eventually tells
him : "One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is
invisible to the eyes."

Simplistic and sentimental as
this may seem, we could call this a very ‘Jewish’ insight; or at least - Saint-Exupéry was not Jewish – an insight
that resonates strongly with a Jewish religious and spiritual understanding.
After all, this is how our storytellers in the Torah present the dilemma for
the Hebrew people – a dilemma they faced from the wilderness days until today:
if you have a God, a divine force, an energy that animates all being, that
cannot be seen, cannot be pictured – except in words – then what is essential
is indeed ‘invisible to the eyes’.

This text from ‘The
Little Prince’ came to mind when I looked at the section of the Torah we were
to read this week: Numbers 33. On the surface it seemed a rather dreary list of
place names – there are 42 in the chapter – starting with Ramses in Egypt
before the crossing of the Sea of Reeds, and finishing in Moab, at the edge of
the Jordan river, opposite Jericho. But as we read the verses we notice that it
isn’t a mere route map – in places we are given tiny vignettes that jog the
historical memory. So Ramses isn’t just the start of the journey, it’s the
place they left as the Egyptians are still burying their first-born (33:4), a
poignant reminder of the cost of the Exodus in human lives, and a stern reminder
that the God of Israel is not only a force for redemption and liberation but is
also portrayed asa destructive force as
well - something the people came to discover to their own cost during their 40
years wandering.

In addition, there’s the
reminder that the people left Egypt defiantly, ‘high-handedly’ – b’yad rama (33:3) – and we realize that
what is being recoded here for the next generation isn’t just a dry list, an
itinerary of stops on a journey, but a series of reminiscences, memory-bursts
of historical moments, triggered by the geographical locations.

And we know – though the
text don’t mention it – that this is an historical and geographical record for
a generation who weren’t there at the beginning of the journey. Only Joshua and
Caleb of the previous generation survive the wilderness years. Once Moses dies,
as he will before the people cross over the Jordan, those two are the only ones
who hold the collective memory of the people, a people for whom ‘Egypt’ is
already a mythic event.

And we realize that is
this what happens in every generation – events in the past slip over the
horizon of time behind us and disappear from active memory. This has happened
recently to the First World War – we have film and diaries and letters, of
course, but nobody who holds it inside themselves any more as a lived
experience: ‘I was there, I saw this, I felt this’.This will happen quite soon – 20 years or so?
- to the Holocaust. What is essential becomes
invisible to the eyes.

And so we have our list
in chapter 33, each place bearing a memory, but most of the memories passed
over in silence. Then suddenly a detail is added – Elim, we hear, is the place
of 12 springs and 70 palm trees (33:9):symbolically, one spring for each tribe and one palm tree for each of
the 70 elders mentioned in the Torah texts (Exodus 24:1; Numbers 11:25). So
these incidental details open up windows onto larger horizons of the people’s
experience.

But for me what is most
striking – and this takes us back to our quotation fromSaint-Exupéry – is what isn’t mentioned in this text which describes a written record of
the desert journey being composed for posterity. An experience you might have
thought was ‘essential’, but ‘invisible to the eye’. And that is what happened
at Mt. Sinai. Between verse 15 and verse 16 there is a large narrative and
experiential hole. ‘They set out from Rephidim and camped in the wilderness of
Sinai and they set out from the wilderness of Sinai and camped at
Kivroth-Hattavah’ (33: 15-16).

The whole purpose of the
Exodus, the whole focus of Israelite history, was not just to free a group of
slaves and give them a place of their own in the sun, but to give them a vision
and a purpose – to enact a moral and ethical and cultural and social way of
being, inspired by principles of justice and compassion. They were to be a
people with a spiritual destiny, a collective mission, to bring a blessing to
humanity, to be a blessing. This is what the revelation at Sinai was about:
Torah, teaching, a way of life, a purpose to be lived out, striven for, from
generation to generation.

And what do we hear about
it in this detailed listing of the desert journeying? ‘They set out from
Rephidim and camped in the wilderness of Sinai and they set out from the
wilderness of Sinai and camped at Kivroth-Hattavah’. Nothing. Not a murmur.
Silence. How come?

I couldn’t find a single
traditional commentator who questions this, or even comments on it. Even the
great medieval commentator Rashi is silent. Modern commentators sometimes note
it but have almost nothing to say about it: the doyen of Biblical scholars
Robert Alter acknowledges it, saying it is ‘surprising’ (‘The Five Books of
Moses’, p.853) – but he doesn’t offer any insight into why it isn’t
mentioned.

The commentary in the
American Conservative Movement’s Etz
Hayim chumash offers this considered view (p.955): ‘The narrative omits the
war with Amalek at Rephidim as well as the manna at Sin, the revelation at
Sinai, and other notable events of the wilderness trek. These events were so well known that they did not need to be repeated’
(my italics added). Are we prepared to be satisfied by that? The American Reform Torah commentary says
something almost identical: ‘Perhaps these events were so well known they did
not need a special note’(p.1234). Not just inelegantly phrased but, along with
the Conservative version, one of the weakest so-called ‘explanations’ you will
ever hear for such a significant puzzle in the Torah.

We need to keep this
question alive. Why is the revelation at Sinai passed over in silence? As if it
hadn’t happened. As if it is a secret wound. As if it were better to avert
one’s gaze. As if there is nothing to be said. As if there’s nothing to be
done. As if darkness were preferable to light. As if silence was more
comforting that knowledge.As if what is
essential must remain invisible to the eye. As if the heart knows something
that the mind represses, refuses to grasp.As if revelation is too painful. As if the word of God cannot be borne.
As if Torah is trauma.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry disappeared over
the Mediterranean in July 1944. I said earlier that he was probably shot down,
by the Luftwaffe, but nobody knows for certain. He just disappeared, his body
was never found. Fifty four years later, in September 1998, a fisherman found a
silver identity bracelet off the coast of Marseille, bearing the name of Saint-Exupéry and his wife. Puzzlingly, it
was far from his intended flight path. Two years later, parts of his plane were
discovered on the sea-bed nearby and three years later the French government
allowed the plane’s remnants to be recovered and put on display.But what actually happened to this
aviator-storyteller nobody knows, or will ever know. What we have, and can
know, are his words.His mysterious
death exemplifies those tantalizing words : "One sees clearly only with the heart. What
is essential is invisible to the eyes."

We will never know about the
mystery of Sinai. What happened. Whether anything happened. Whether the silence
of Numbers 33 contains a profound truth about an event that exists only in
words, in story, in the heart of the Jewish people. As if it were a dream,
where we see clearly, but on awakening realize that what we have seen cannot
bear the light of day. That we cannot bear it in the light of day.

Something was revealed - and
our lives depend on it. Something was revealed, invisible to the eyes, and we
go on speaking about it - though it is lost forever. The Torah - like the
identity-bracelet, like the relics of a crashed plane - is all we have left, as
an aide-mémoireaide-mémoire. The Torah reminds us: something can be too painful, or awesome, to
keep in mind. For better, or worse, "What is essential is invisible to the
eyes."

[loosely based on a sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, London, August
6th, 2016]